bankai
The easiest way to compile JavaScript, HTML and CSS.
We want people to have fun building things for the web. There should be no
hurdles between a great idea, and your first prototype. And once you're ready,
it should be easy to package it up and share it online. That's Bankai: a tool
that helps you build for the web. No configuration, and no hassle - that's our
promise.
If this is your first time building something for the web, take a look at
choojs/create-choo-app to help get
a project setup from scratch :sparkles:.
Usage
$ bankai <command> [entry] [options]
Commands:
build compile all files to dist/
inspect inspect the bundle dependencies
start start a development server
Options:
-d, --debug output lots of logs
-h, --help print usage
-q, --quiet don't output any logs
-v, --version print version
Examples:
Start a development server
$ bankai start index.js
Visualize all dependencies in your project
$ bankai inspect index.js
Compile all files in the project to disk
$ bankai build index.js
Running into trouble? Feel free to file an issue:
https://github.com/choojs/bankai/issues/new
Do you enjoy using this software? Become a backer:
https://opencollective.com/choo
⚠️ HTTPS Instructions
When you first open up your application in a browser, you'll probably see a
warning page about HTTPS connections being untrusted. No worries, this is
entirely expected behavior. Follow the instructions below to solve this for
your browser.
How does this work?
For HTTPS to run on localhost
, we must sign a TLS certificate
locally. This is better known as a "self-signed certificate". Browsers
actively check for certificates from uknown providers, and warn you (for good
reason!) In our case, however, it's safe to ignore.
HTTPS is needed for an increasing amount of APIs to work in the browser. For
example if you want to test HTTP/2 connections or use parts of the storage
API, you have no choice but to use an HTTPS connection on localhost. That's
why we try and make this work as efficiently, and securely as possible.
We generate a unique certificate for each Bankai installation. This means
that you'll only need to trust an HTTPS certificate for Bankai once. This
should be secure from remote attackers, because unless they have successfully
acquired access to your machine's filesystem, they won't be able to replicate
the certificate.
Firefox Instructions
Step 1
A wild security screen appears!. Click on "advanced".
Step 2
More details emerge! Click on "Add Exception".
Step 3
In the dropdown click "Confirm Security Exception".
Step 4
Success!
Chrome Instructions
Click the "more details" dropdown, then click "proceed". Pull Request for
screenshots welcome!
Safari Instructions
Step 1
A wild security screen appears! Click "Show Certificate".
Step 2
More details emerge! Check "Always trust 'localhost'…".
Step 3
The box is checked! Click "Continue".
Step 4
A box is asking you for your crendentials. Fill them in, and hit "Enter".
Step 5
Success!
Optimizations
Bankai applies lots of optimizations to projects. Generally you won't need to
care how we do this: it's lots of glue code, and not necessarily pretty. But it
can be useful to know which optimizations we apply. This is a list:
JavaScript
- yo-yoify: Optimize
choo
HTML code so it run significantly faster in the
browser. - glslify: Adds a module system to GLSL shaders.
- brfs: Statically inline calls to
fs.readFile()
. Useful to ship assets
in the browser. - envify: Allow environment variables to be used in the bundle. Especially
useful in combination with minification, which removes unused code paths.
- split-require: Lazy load parts of your application using the
require('split-require')
function. - babelify: Bring the latest browser features to all browsers. See
our babel section for more details.
And bankai uses tinyify, which adds the following optimizations:
- browser-pack-flat: Remove function wrappers from the bundle, making
the result faster to run and easier to minify.
- bundle-collapser: Remove all pathnames from inside the bundle, and
replace them with IDs. This not only makes bundles smaller, it prevents
details from your local dev setup leaking.
- common-shakeify: Remove unused JavaScript code from the bundle. Best
known as dead code elimination or tree shaking.
- unassertify: Remove all
require('assert')
statements from the code.
Only applied for production builds. - uglifyify: Minify the bundle.
CSS
- sheetify: extract all inline CSS from JavaScript, and include it in
bundle.js
. - purifyCSS: removes unused CSS from the project.
- cleanCSS: minify the bundle.
HTML
- inline-critical-css: extract all crititical CSS for a page into the
<head>
of the document. This means that every page will be able to render
after the first roundtrip, which makes for super snappy pages. - async load scripts: loads scripts in the background using the
defer
attribute. - async load styles: loads styles in the background using the
preload
attribute. - async load styles: preloads fonts in the background using the
preload
attribute. - server render: server renders Choo applications. We're welcome to
supporting other frameworks too. PRs welcome!
- manifest: includes a link to
manifest.json
so the application can be
installed on mobile. - viewport: defines the right viewport dimensions to make applications
accessible for everyone.
- theme color: sets the theme color defined in
manifest.json
so the
navigator bar on mobile is styled on brand. - title: sets the right title on a page. Either extracts it from the
application (choo only, for now) or uses whatever the title is in
manifest.json
. - live reload: during development, we inject a live reload script.
Configuration
The Bankai CLI doesn't take any flags, other than to manipulate how we log to
the console. Configuring Bankai is done by modifying package.json
.
Bankai is built on three technologies: browserify
,
sheetify
, and documentify
. Because these can be
configured inside package.json
it means that Bankai itself can be configured
from there too. Also if people ever decide to switch from the command line to
JavaScript, no extra configuration is needed.
{
"name": "my-app",
"browserify": {
"transform": [
"some-browserify-transform"
]
},
"sheetify": {
"transform": [
"some-sheetify-transform"
]
},
"documentify": {
"transform": [
"some-documentify-transform"
]
}
}
By default, Bankai starts with an empty HTML document, injecting the tags
mentioned above. You can also create a custom template as index.html
,
and Bankai will inject tags into it instead.
...
module.exports = app.mount('#app')
...
<body>
<div id="app"></div>
<div id="footer">© 2018</div>
</body>
...
HTTP
Bankai can be hooked up directly to an HTTP server, which is useful when
working on full stack code.
var bankai = require('bankai/http')
var http = require('http')
var path = require('path')
var compiler = bankai(path.join(__dirname, 'client.js'))
var server = http.createServer(function (req, res) {
compiler(req, res, function () {
res.statusCode = 404
res.end('not found')
})
})
server.listen(8080, function () {
console.log('listening on port 8080')
})
Babel
Not all browsers support all of the Web Platform's features. So in order to use
newer features on older browsers, we have to find a solution. The best solution
out there at the moment is Babel.
Babel is a plugin-based JavaScript compiler. It takes
JavaScript in, and outputs JavaScript based for the platforms you've decided to
target. In Bankai we target the last 2 versions of FireFox, Chrome and Edge,
and every other browser that's used by more than 1% of people on earth. This
includes IE11. And if you have different opinions on which browsers to use,
Bankai respects .babelrc
and .browserslistrc
files.
Some newer JavaScript features require loading an extra library; async/await
being the clearest example. To enable this features, the babel-polyfill
library needs to be included in your application's root (e.g. index.js
).
require('babel-polyfill')
We don't include this file by default in Bankai, because it has a significant
size overhead. Once Babel includes only the language features you're using,
we'll work to include babel-polyfill
by default.
Events
compiler.on('error', callback(nodeName, edgeName, error))
Whenever an internal error occurs.
compiler.on('change', callback(nodeName, edgeName, state))
Whenever a change in the internal graph occurs.
API
compiler = bankai(entry, [opts])
Create a new bankai instance. Takes a path to a JavaScript file as the first
argument. The following options are available:
- opts.quiet: Defaults to
false
. Don't output any data to stdout
. Useful
if you have your own logging system. - opts.watch: Defaults to
true
. Watch for changes in the source files and
rebuild. Set to false
to get optimized bundles.
compiler.documents(routename, [opts], done(err, { buffer, hash }))
Output an HTML bundle for a route. Routes are determined based on the project's
router. Pass '/'
to get the default route.
- opts.state: Will be passed the render function for the route, and inlined
in the
<head>
of the body as window.initialState
.
compiler.scripts(filename, done(err, { buffer, hash }))
Pass in a filename and output a JS bundle.
compiler.assets(assetName, done(err, { buffer, hash }))
Output any other file besides JS, CSS or HTML.
compiler.styles(name, done(err, { buffer, hash }))
Output a CSS bundle.
compiler.manifest(done(err, { buffer, hash }))
Output a manifest.json
.
compiler.serviceWorker(done(err, { buffer, hash }))
Output a service worker.
compiler.close()
Close all file watchers.
License
Apache License 2.0